There are 24 books in the Tanakh. Of these, 21 (all but Psalms, Proverbs, and Job) share a grammatical system of cantillation marks, or te’amim. Of these 21, Ashkenazim have melodic traditions for reading eighteen of them. The Torah has its system, the prophets have the Haftarah system, the three festival scrolls have their shared system, and Esther and Lamentations have their own unique systems. But what of the three remaining books? . . .

We are sharing these tables for Taamei haMikra (cantillation for Torah reading) because we weren’t able to find these available in Unicode Hebrew text anywhere else on the Internet. We would very much like to also share the traditional tables of Taamei haMikra for the Nusaḥ Roma (Italy), Nusaḥ Teman (Yemen), and others along with excellent free-culture licensed recordings of these tables being chanted. Unfortunately, there is a paucity of free-culture licensed audio and video of the taamei hamikra being chanted. Please help us by sharing your audio or video with a Creative Commons Attribution license. . . .

For aspiring ba’al koreh (readers) of Megillat Esther studying its various styles of cantillation (Hebrew, ta’amei hamiqra or in Yiddish, trope), a fair number of recordings are popping up online, but only one so far is being shared with a free/libre, copyleft license thanks to Gabriel Seed, lead developer of zemirotdatabase.org. The audio file is free to redistribute and remix under the CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported license. We’re honored to share Gabriel’s recording of a zarqa table for Megillat Esther read in the Nusaḥ Ashkenaz style. Megillat Esther – Ta’amei Hamiqra: MP3 | OGG . . .

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